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That last clause means you don’t understand how to change it, and your idea of how it’s broken is a just-so theory that doesn’t work. What looks like “broken culture” is nearly always referred pain from something else invisible. “Culture” can’t actually break. It’s not a machine.
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In smaller orgs, the major issue is the board / C-suite not wanting to make hard choices: ie do a layoff + replace a lot of managers and start performance mgmt on ICs to turn the culture over. That's not an understanding problem, but a power/buy-in problem.
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Culture can "break" as in get dysfunctional. The questions are: Are your values / org systems still valid for your current mission/strategy? Are you actually hiring people / running things according to these values? It's pretty straightforward to know these things actually.
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You're describing certain problem diagnosis and solving behaviors that work for you in "culture" language, but it doesn't mean that's the "correct" way of thinking about them. It's a conceptual UI that works for you. IME it's a bad one that creates a cognitive tax.
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You have a surprising reference set then. Almost nobody I work with thinks about it this way, possibly because I generally work with larger companies where "culture" has been reified into a culturewashing theater run by HR, and line execs use other frames to avoid that morass
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And in like half the cases I think of as really well-run effective companies, the "culture" crowd would call the culture toxic/bad/broken/dysfunctional etc. (and in fact do exactly that). They can't recognize that it's actually working beautifully. They just don't belong there.
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I'm definitely thinking of "culture works" = the goals are hit, not that it's a fit for an individual. To me culture/values must fit the strategy/mission on an org and the people are hired by their fit to that strategy/mission/culture/values.
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